Debian Weekly News - August 5th, 2003

Welcome to this year's 31st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. Few of you may have noticed this already, but as per the results of last year's security survey the Debian Security Team doesn't support potato (Debian 2.2)
anymore. Also, Robin 'Roblimo' Miller explained
why governments should be allowed to specify Free Software.

Booting Debian with Eye-Candy. Martin Michlmayr wondered
about having Debian show nice graphics during boot up, rather than boot
messages in text mode. He discussed this with Herbert Xu, who explained that
this is no longer a kernel issue. Once the framebuffer driver is loaded, a
user space process can do arbitrary graphical operations on the console.
Alastair McKinstry pointed
out that debian-installer already uses framebuffer support
in modules and that work is under way to divert all stderr
towards a logging solution.

MPlayer moves closer to being Free. Andrea Mennucc and
Dariush Pietrzak worked
on mplayer checking copyright information and asked
for volunteers to re-check the source code to ensure it
satisfies the Debian Free
Software Guidelines. Adam Warner was pleased
with the work and made some suggestions. After it was pointed
out that mplayer contains problematic DVD Content Scrambling
System (CSS) code, Andrea repackaged
it with the CSS code removed. He would appreciate feedback on its
suitability for Debian main.

Linux is a Process, not a Product. In a commentary on
ZDNet.com.com Ian Murdock explained that Linux is not a
product but a process. "To think of Linux as a product is to freeze an
inherently dynamic thing in time and to close something that is
inherently open. It cannot be done without losing something -- and
something significant at that".

Philosophy behind Knoppix. Klaus Knopper was interviewed
about Free Software, the roots of and ideas behind Knoppix, his interests and the
future of his Knoppix project. In his opinion, the GNU software suite,
together with the Linux kernel, have become the most flexible and usable
operating system and application software available for a vast variety of
hardware platforms.

More automatic BTS Reports. Nikita Youshchenko suggested
that the bug tracking system (BTS) generates more automatic mails than just the
list of release critical bugs and the work
needing packages report. He would like to see a list of bugs that have a
"patch" tag for (e.g.) 2 weeks and no "wontfix" tag, a list of bugs that are
more than N months old and also don't carry a "wontfix" tag and a list of
packages with huge bug lists that probably need community help.

DebConf 2005 in Vienna? Gerfried Fuchs proposed to
organise the Debian conference for 2005 in Vienna, since he would like to
attend a Debian conference as well. A good argument
for Vienna is that it is centrally located in Europe and is close to the eastern
countries of the continent, which could help our friends from Eastern Europe
to attend the conference more conveniently. Finally, Tollef sent in his experiences
from the Oslo Debian conference.

Synchronising the BTS and Bugzilla. Erich Schubert has written a
small Perl script which queries the Debian bug tracking system for bugs forwarded to
bugzilla (GNOME in this case) and creates a list of the bugs and their status in
bugzilla. This should help tracking which forwarded bugs were closed by
upstream.

Debian in Schools. Thomas Lindemans explained at the European Schoolnet, a partnership of 26 Ministries of Education, why
educators should try GNU/Linux. Debian is mentioned as being
"built for stability" and good for those who enjoy a "fast and secure
operating system". The article suggests that using Debian in a school would
require somebody with knowledge of Linux because of text configuration files,
however no mention is made of Skolelinux or the Debian-Edu subproject.

Status of Debian/AMD64. Access to an Opteron machine was
granted
to the Debian project after a discussion with AMD at this year's LinuxTag. Bart Trojanowski also announced
a birds of a feather session targeting the Debian port to AMD64 at this
year's Ottawa Linux
Symposium. Bart explained
that a few libraries are ported
to the AMD64 architecture but they are not yet sufficient to run
applications.

Benchmarking Debian's Performance. Indranath Neogy tried
to discover
what kind of gains the source based nature of Gentoo might give it over
Debian and Mandrake. The tests included timing how
long it took to open a large sheet in Gnumeric, how long to compile the Linux
kernel and how long to perform various operations in GIMP. Gentoo was
expected to lead in the tests, but the results showed no significant
variation between the distributions. Simple recompiling doesn't seem to speed
things up, fine grained tuning may.

CUPS as the default Print Service. Petter Reinholdtsen suggested
that the default print system in the next release of Debian (sarge) be
changed to CUPS, because it is a more
complete, more user friendly and RFC compliant printing system. Daniel
Jacobowitz found
that CUPS lacked functionality, but Cyrille Chepelov thought
CUPS has improved over the last 18 months.

LinuxTag Show Report. Nicholas Blachford reported on his experience at
this year's LinuxTag. He said that
"the Debian stand seemed to be one of the most popular stands,
constantly getting a crowd of people, many of whom picked up the Debian CDs they were
giving away. At the back of the booth they ran an ASCII art animation via a
beamer which got some very bewildered looks at times".

LSB Presentations at LinuxWorld. The Linux Standard Base (LSB) project will
be delivering a tutorial, two presentations, and a "Taste of Linux"
discussion at LinuxWorld
in San Francisco. These presentations
will take place on August 5 and 6 and will include "Designing and
Implementing Great Shared Libraries", presented by Ted Ts'o. Amongst other
things, Ted is a Debian Developer and Linux kernel contributor.

Inconsistencies in our Handling of Licenses. John Goerzen is
getting
an increasingly uneasy feeling about the consensus that appears to be starting
to coalesce around our handling of the FDL, RFC issues and related
matter. He mentions that the DFSG are guidelines, not a definition, that we allow information to be
distributed with software under even more stricter terms than the FDL, that
standards have to be handled different to software, and that we need to think
about whether the actions we take are advancing our goals or not.

DeCSS for Debian? There has been an Intent to
Package for DeCSS, a utility for stripping CSS tags from an HTML page.
Sam Hocevar objected to
this cluttering of the package namespace with a useless program. Brian Nelson
quoted
the project's website which admits
that it is pretty much useless.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

Orphaned Packages. 3 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 183 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

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